I told him this would probably be all that he need ever know; and he looked up at me in a fashion he has, the silky brown ears falling either side of the white face.  It is a look of languishing, melting adoration, and if I face him steadily, he must always turn away as if to avoid being overcome—­as if the sight of beauty so great as mine could be borne full in the eyes only for the briefest of moments.

But Clem came now, ranging my breakfast dishes about the bowl of plum flowers, and I approached the table with all the ardor he could have wished at his softly spoken, “Yo’ is suhved, Mahstah Majah.”

The sight of Clem, however, inevitably suggests the person to whom I am indebted for his sustaining ministrations.  Potts had been a necessary instrument in one of those complications which the gods devise among us human ephemera for their mild amusement on a day of ennui.  And Potts, having served his purpose, had been neatly removed.  I have said that the Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled.  By the hands of the gods had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or patented device of culture.

A month before, in a far-off place, J. Rodney Potts had suffered extinction through the apparently casual agency of a moving railway train, the intervention of the gods in all such matters being discreetly veiled so that the denser of us shall suspect nothing but that they were the merest of accidents.

One could only surmise that the widow viewed this happening with a kind of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories attuned to a gentle melancholy.  I know that she placed on view in her parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him, the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained the fancy of even a superior woman.  But the widow was not publicly anguished.  She donned a gown and bonnet of black in testimony of her bereavement, but there was no unnecessary flaunt of crape in her decently symbolic garb.  As Aunt Delia McCormick phrased it, she was not in “heavy mourning,”—­merely “in light distress.”

The town was content to let it go at that, especially after the adjustment of certain formalities which enabled the widow for a time to suspend her work of ministering to its higher wants.

The railway company had at first, it appeared, been disposed to view its removal of Potts very lightly indeed; not only because of his unimposing appearance, but by reason of his well-attested mental condition at the time of the occurrence—­a condition clearly self-induced, and one that placed him beyond those measures of safety which a common carrier is obliged to exercise in behalf of its patrons.

But a package of letters had been discovered among the meagre belongings of the unfortunate man, and these had placed the matter in a very different light.  They showed conclusively that the victim had been of importance, a citizen of rare values in any community that he might choose to favor with his presence.